Neural Substrates of Symbol Use

Wed, 05/30/2007 - 02:01 - NLN

The capacity to use and manipulate symbols has been heralded as a uniquely human capacity (although we know at least a few cases where that seems untrue). The cognitive processes involved in symbol use have proven difficult to understand, perhaps because reductionist scientific methods seem to decompose this rich domain into a variety of smaller components, none of which seems to capture the most important or abstract characteristics of symbol use.

So, it's important to specify how the simpler and better-understood aspects of symbol processing may interact and give rise to higher-level aspects of symbol processing, such as those involved in algebra. A productive approach to solving this problem of "reconstruction" is to consider the computational tradeoffs that may confront a flexible symbol processing system.

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